Ultimate PHP suckage list

The other day, one of my co-workers posted a link to a semi-comprehensive list of everything that's wrong with PHP. This should be required reading for anyone who claims to like PHP.

The best thing about this article is that I actually learned a number of things from it. Apparently PHP has a lot of WTFs that I simply hadn't run into. Though it's relatively minor, my personal favorite is :

"gzgetss - Get line from gz-file pointer and strip HTML tags." I'm dying to know the
series of circumstances that led to this function's conception.


I would also love to know what motivated someone to include this function in the zlib extension. I mean, how many people have ever actually used that function? Like, three? It's ridiculously specialized and isn't part of the C API (I know because I checked) - there's no reason for it to exist. To me, that perfectly sums up the language's lack of any coherent design or sense of priority.

Of course, there were plenty of other nice little gems. For instance, the face that when $x is null, $x++ is 1, but $x-- is null. Or the notion that named parameters were rejected as a feature because they would "make for messier code". There's certainly lots of information and humor value there for anybody who is familiar with PHP.

Personally, after reading that, I think it's time for me to brush up on my C# and Python. I've been making my living writing PHP for five years now, and I fear it may be causing brain damage. After all, Edsger Dijkstra said that BASIC warps the mind, and PHP has been called "the Visual Basic of the web". And after reading this article, can there really be any doubt?

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